The invention relates generally to automatic management of configuration parameters as well as to a parameter management engine.
The invention relates further to a computer system, a data processing program, and a computer program product.
In enterprises, IT environments are usually managed and organized in lines or projects. A line or project basically refers to a set of IT systems or IT environments (IT=information technology) for a specific application or functional area like, e.g., customer procurement portal application or a content management and collaboration application, or the hosting of a certain web application, and typically consists of multiple IT environments in different stages, e.g. one or multiple for development of the application, one for testing of the application, one for integration testing of the application and finally one for production use of the application. An IT environment, in particular a service instance in one project should be managed consistently across different computing systems of the different stages according to a service definition in order to ensure that the application developed in one environment also works in the other environments of the project.
In particular, parameters of the environments, i.e., different computing systems per stage, have to be managed in a consistent way.
Current solutions for parameter management of computing systems only work on a single system level, without including policies or rules on a larger scope as in a project. Such solutions may only be used to propagate parameter changes over homogeneous systems, not taking into account the roles of systems in a project. For example, on a project level parameter management, a more structural approach is needed to implement project level and even enterprise level policies for parameter management.
In particular, with the advent of Cloud Computing where composite IT services may be set up rapidly based on templates, known as service definition, parameters must be managed across instances of different Cloud Services that belong to a project, the above mentioned requirement must be met.
Document U.S. 2009/0300341A1 discloses a system and method for automatic configuration of portal composite applications. Configuration parameters are defined within a composite application template. These parameters in turn define the runtime behavior of the composite application within a predetermined range of variability, and each parameter defines a receptive point of variability.
Thus, there may be a need for an improved method and an engine for managing configuration parameters of related computing systems, in particular computing systems that are related due to a common purpose or project.